This is a picture of Idan Raichel and Vieux Farka Touré performing at Symphony Space in New York in 2014. They performed an arrangement of music Raichel had written for Psalm 136. He explained to the audience before he performed it: “In my side of the world, you are not great until your music is heard in the synagogues.” It struck me at the time as a comment in the mode of the medieval Spanish poets writing both secular and liturgical poetry, both as different ways of showing off themselves and the Hebrew language.
The psalm starts at the 7:35 mark below, but listen to the whole thing; it’s music I love.
This one, the sound isn’t as good and he’s kind of dithering around a bit, but he’s performing in a synagogue setting:
My intellectual lineage is such that it is perhaps inevitable that I will always think about poetry and music together. Once you accept that Bob Dylan has more in common with the Provençal troubadours than not, something breaks open in the theories of literature that govern your reading. I will always be a Clapton girl at heart, but the more medieval poetry that I have read, the more I have come to appreciate rap, hip-hop and R&B music. I know, I know — what a bougie, white-girl, academic way to come to those genres, but all the same, maybe that’s the point: Maybe medieval poetry maybe shouldn’t be quite so rarefied and reified in the canon.
For Black History Month, the Black Jewish writer MaNishtana shared music videos on Facebook featuring Black Jewish artists; that’s where I first came across this song, which draws heavily on the words of Psalm 23. I found it compelling on its own: I think that rhyming “so the world should know” with “le-ma’an shemo” (1:15) is pretty close to poetic genius — although I’ll admit I’ve always been a sucker for a solid bilingual rhyme.
I don’t think I’m really saying anything earth-shattering by pointing out the cultural-contextual similarities between rap music and medieval poetry; it’s certainly one that I’ve found useful in the past in teaching and in presenting medieval poetry to a lay audience. I’m writing this now more because I was just really grabbed by a new-to-me example of the phenomenon of sampling which is a striking demonstration of the ways in which Jewish poets draw not only from the Bible but from the literary, poetic, and musical traditions around them in their broader local communities.
This song plays with several modes of traditional Jewish writing, but also draws in its rootedness in hip-hop in a way that very much reflects the practices of the medieval Hebrew poets from Spain. The song uses medieval modes of commentary on a biblical text; it recourses to tropes about God and writing that we find all over medieval Jewish models; and it is bilingual and bicultural in ways that reflect the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets’ borrowings from other languages and the dominant cultural and literary contexts they inhabited. Continue reading ““I Sing: Mizmor le-David”: Hebro and the Hebrew Poets”
